App of the Week: Picniic aims to get your family life in order

This week’s App of the Week is designed to move family management off the fridge and onto the phone or tablet.

Picniic is a family organizer, an “operating system for your home,” that aims to put everything a family needs in one convenient place.

For busy parents in a modern world, trying to keep a family organized can feel a lot like swimming up stream. A whole lot of work, but not a lot of progress. The chores aren’t getting done, schedules are clashing, and the kids should have been back from practice an hour ago!

Picniic positions itself as the solution to all these problems. First, create your family profile, and sync all of your family’s calendars. Then begin delegating. All data is shareable between members of the family, and anything can be assigned to a member’s profile. The main features of the family dashboard include a unified calendar, to-do’s and lists, family locators, an info locker, and a catalog of recipes.

In the calendar, you can create reminders like “garbage day” that re-occur so that no one forgets. If you’re trying to schedule a group event, you can send out a questionnaire poll to find out which options work best for everyone. You can sync all of your calendars into one mega-calendar, and filter between individual calendars as well.

The app lets you share shopping lists, so that a spouse coming home from work doesn’t have to ask what to get at the store. If your son or daughter runs out of shampoo, they can add to the shopping list, too. You can assign chores to different profiles, and see when they’ve been completed. The family news feed lets everyone know when a new task has been added or completed, and it also functions as a group chat.

Courtesy of Picniic

The most unique feature is the recipe catalog. Here you can save your favorite recipes or add your own. The app comes with tons of recipes from popular cooking sites like Martha Stewart, Bon Appetite, the Food Network and more. After you find a recipe you like, you can add it to the family Grocery List built into the app.

The app is free to download, but the $15/month premium option grants you access to a family locator, an info locker to store important information you might need at doctors’ appointments, and a Meal Planner. You can also integrate TeamSnap to manage all your child’s sports schedules, if their team uses that platform.

While the app is intended for families, I could also see Picniic helping out anyone who has roommates. The free version comes with access to the family news feed, shared calendars, recipe catalogs, to-do’s, and lists.

Picniic is available for iPad and iPhone in the App Store. A web interface is also available.

App of the Week is a regular feature of the GeekWire radio show and podcast, airing at 7 p.m. Saturdays and 1 p.m. Sundays on KIRO Radio (97.3 FM) in the Seattle region, except when pre-empted by live sports. The show runs every weekend on GeekWire.com. Get every episode using this RSS feed, or subscribe in iTunes, SoundCloud and Stitcher. Note: GeekWire may receive a share of the revenue from your purchase of apps or content through affiliate partnerships.

GeekWire summer intern David Schwartz isa University of Washington senior majoring in International Studies. He is a business owner, music lover, a professional DJ, and event MC.